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Kindle First gives early access to Amazon titles for 99p

Amazon has lifted the lid on another treat for Kindle users, only a week after announcing its Kindle Unlimited subscription service. Kindle First offers readers early access to new books across popular genres from Amazon Publishing.

Amazon Publishing will select four titles every month and Kindle First customers will be able to select one and download it for only 99p. If you're an Amazon Prime customer the deal is even better -- you can download one book for free.

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Joining Kindle First is completely free and customers are under no obligation to purchase any of the titles on offer. All you need to do to take advantage of the deal is sign up to the monthly email in order to be informed about which titles can be read early and when they will become available. Or you can just head over to the Kindle First page and choose one of the books from there, before it is sent directly to your Kindle.

October's book selection includes From the Cradle by Louise Voss and Mark Edwards, The Glassblower by Petra Durst-Benning, The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter by Craig Lancaster and My Sister's Grave by Robert Dugoni.

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Kindle First isn't just a good deal for readers -- it serves as an opportunity for Amazon to push new titles from its own publishing imprints in front of Kindle customers. Amazon has something of an unfair advantage in terms of marketing its own new material for its own hardware here, so no wonder some of the big publishing houses currently have a tense relationship with the company.

The standoff between Amazon and publisher Hachette has been going on for months now, as the two companies have not been able to agree on wholesale pricing terms, particularly when it comes to ebooks. The

New York Times reported only this week that a group of literary heavyweights who are not even Hachette authors -- including the likes of Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera and V S Naipaul -- are standing alongside the publisher as it attempts to hold its own against Amazon.

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Meanwhile, Amazon has refused to promote the majority of titles from Hachette, while simultaneously creating new marketing strategies such as Kindle First to promote the work of authors represented by its own publishing house.

Kindle Unlimited -- Amazon's other recently launched service, which works like a Netflix for books -- offers consumers more choice by providing a wide range of titles from many different publishers. It's of course unlikely that anyone would sign up to Kindle Unlimited if it only included books from Amazon's imprint, but just as it is doing with video and games, Amazon is increasingly producing its own content and using the exclusivity as a reason to draw customers in.

The true test for Kindle First, of course, will be whether Amazon's publishing imprints are publishing anything decent. It takes more than free giveaways to create best-selling authors and win Man Booker awards.